Others - Going Deeper [Beta 1.5] [NRFB Games]

Good game, worth playing for people who like generaly text-based gameplay. Feels like match in DND. Many interesting mechanics and features.
4\5

The ero-trap-dungeon format is usually a vehicle for spitting out tentacle-rape animations in an action setting, but here in Going Deeper, it's a slow burn primarily in a turn-based text format.

The writing is the star of the show here - your POV is that of a commander/voyeur, and the writing is good about sticking to that. You rarely get a full picture about what's happening, and that helps with the eroticism going on.

Is the art style weird? Yes, but the lack of visual detail weirdly works to redirect your attention to the text instead of just encouraging you to tab through looking for the next pretty picture.

Is the game good? That's... hard to answer. It's unique, in that you spend a lot of 'gameplay' on autopilot waiting for something potentially catastrophic to happen, and occasionally scrambling to rescue your knights from getting their brains fucked out. It functions a bit like a roguelike/deckbuilder style, in that your 'deck' is mostly fixed but you have some tools for slowly influencing it one way or another.

Despite all that, it weirdly works and easily eats hours.

Is very rouge like.

Is very challenging just to not get corruption break by lust when i try to keeping them pure. every floor does increase room and it become more harder to remove monster just to get P1 corruption for curse dispel instead of P10 for quick game over and room increase and corruption wave faster the deeper it is.

it does have helper but it have to do task and loan some mana to lessen the burden.

con: when removing the curse it have chance to remove ult skill of character.

Bug(idk): I'm very annoy when removing the Negative status that can only be remove by an ally you have to fight or disarm the trap the current room just to wake/remove the Negative status

bug: The continues turn did not work out even with shift + space and i have to click many times just to get them on stairs

this game have potential.
Eggcellent.
I did not see alot of H-scane because im very focus on resisting when it comes to corruption break thus i give up and waiting for more update.
is because i did not do what this game have offer to me.
i will be back few months just to suffer again.

I am looking foward to seeing the full release for this game.

It is a game before it is porn, which is a rarity among most of the stuff on this site.

The mechanics are interesting to learn and play with. You learn more with each run rougelike style.

There is a lot of fetish content. You take the girls into your tent alone and take control of their mind so that they can be more proficient at the fighting style you have chosen from them. Very nice.

The story is interesting to observe.

The scenes are somewhat scarce for the moment. But it is still in beta.

Please add 36 more Lucette sex scenes as she is the best girl. Thank you.

This is a fantastic slowburn corruption game.
There are 2 main parts to the game: a camp section where you prepare spells, research phenomena you've come across and talk to/seduce 3 cute paladins who have come to purify the evil inside a mysterious dungeon.
The second part involves exploring the aforementioned dungeon, which is filled with traps, monsters and treasure. If you don't like this part, it can mostly be automated.

Fetishes are mostly centered around corruption and mind control. In theory, these are optional but the game clearly expects you to feel tempted to use them and if you try to go for a "pure" route, you'll miss out on most of the content.
There are about 40-50 h-scenes, total playtime is ~10 hours if you want to see 70% of them and another ~10 if you want to see everything. If you REALLY like the gameplay, there's even a new game+ with tons of options for increasing or decreasing the difficulty.

The writing is of very, very high quality and the characters and artstyle are full of charm. I have nothing negative to say, this game is simply a masterpiece.

[Alpha 16 review]
4 stars for effort. This is resembling an actual game, even if it's lacking on the lewd department.

A good amount of work has been put into it, and it's quite good for an alpha.
Worth checking again further down the line to see what it evolves into.

Before we get into the review I want to clarify that this is for the Alpha 14.1 and I will base my scoring on the potential that I see for this, not just the current content.

This is one of those games where you can easily see, that the dev cares about all aspects of it. If this had no NSFW content, I would still play it. The systems are pretty deep but not overly complex to get into, the UX looks great (with some minor kinks to work out which I will get to) and the writing is honestly the best I have read in an indie game in years.
I don't want to spoil too much but at some point you meet a character that only speaks in riddles and poetry and it's amazingly well written dialogue. I have no idea who the person behind this game is but I want to read more from you, dude.
Thankfully in this game, there is a lot to read. This is combined with pretty few actually NSFW graphics but (in my opinion) very hot descriptions of what's going on. The event system in general is pretty cool with prior effects on the characters being taken into account in the description of what happens. Clearing a floor genuinely reads like a story despite being randomly generated.
The actual story of the game also seems very interesting and morally grey - it's not long enough yet to give a real rating and I don't want to spoil but I can certainly say that I want to know how it continues.
The graphics where they exist are pretty simple, keeping with the style of the games pixelated visuals. The music is another very nice aspect - I just realized that I never got annoyed by it in my multiple hours of playtime and that's pretty rare for me.

Of course with an alpha there are still some things that aren't polished or finished yet - for this game this is mainly content. The story stops after a few floors and after some time even the floors run out. This is of course intended to change with more versions.

Then I have some problems with the UI:
- Why do I get back to camp menu after researching something? I now have to open up my research tab and find my next research which is quite annoying when wanting to research multiple things in a row. Would prefer if the research tab just stayed open.
- More options for when to pause would be appreciated for the auto-mode (e.g. on finding a specific kind of room, on failing to dodge trap, on scry being off cooldown etc. etc.)
- When a text is bigger than the text box and it becomes scrollable, progressing with leftclick doesn't work anymore for some reason

And one final feature request:
A collection page that can be viewed outside of runs. These things seem to be tracked globally anyway, so having them easily accessible would be great.

And that's it! From my pretty minor critiques you can once again tell that I was happy (and honestly quite impressed) with my experience. I will try to keep up with this game and update my review when more content becomes available. Deserved 5/5

[Alpha 12]

This is a perfect example of a game with lots of potential, with all the good and bad that comes with this title.
To summarize my thoughts, it is very much worth checking out, it will be addictive if enough events and interactions with your allies are added, it is still very much an alpha title, and the ai art is used very well to the point that if the game wasn't tagged as such, I'm not sure I could tell if I didn't go looking for it.
Right now, the biggest thing holding it back is the lack of content, which is expected for an alpha. The amount of time between "playing blind and getting events by happenstance" and "changing your play to try and trigger as many events as possible" is a couple hours at most. When there's enough content to stretch that time past 5-10 hours or even more, that's what'll make this game dangerous.
Additionally, and maybe I just haven't found it yet, but there doesn't seem to be an in-universe reason for the game to be a roguelike. It's got the "randomized, ever-changing dungeon" aspect, but not the "excuse to restart with nothing" part. Not a deal-breaker, and I could be talking out my ass anyway, but it would be nice to see.
Will keep a close eye and NOT support because every project I find on this site that I support dies. Check it out.

While it's definitely in Alpha, at least as of this posting, it's still pretty solid. It's a little devoid of particularly lewd content at the moment, mostly teasings and light stuff, but that's fine. It's also a porn game, with emphasis on the latter, which has its warts if you're looking for, well, porn, I suppose.

Tested Alpha 10.1:

- Gameplay loop is nice. You play for more than the lewd.
- Vast amount of different options and strategies, a bit unbalanced atm but it's an alpha.
- Developer interact with users and take their feedback into account.
- Roguelite: it's ok to lose, you still gain new unlocks (there might be some runs when you run deep but still earn nothing: maybe this will change in the future)

I put 5/5 to encourage the developper. This looks great, and looks like it will be even greater!

[Written for Alpha 9.1]
[Summary]
In short, you lead a team of cute lady knights in a roguelike through different dungeon floors. On those floors, you have a choice of letting your knights take on corruption or curses. Corruption lowers their stats, while curses have all sorts of effects. After each floor you return to camp where the fun begins. You can manipulate the mind of the knights to change their behaviour, accept or reject the curses (changing their mind in the process), and you can scry (spy) on them while they go about their day.

And you can also research and prepare for the next dungeon, and there's an extensive skill system, but that's not why you're here I think.

[Characterization & Atmosphere]
The characterization of the knights is top-notch. They are well written, and any action they do in camp has a lot of flavor associated with it. It really makes it all feel lifelike, and makes you enjoy the mind manipulation so much more.
This section is rather short, since it's easier to complain about the bad than praise the good. But this is really why you should play the game. Inviting the knights to your tent and warping their desires is tons of fun. Of course, if you don't thing that sounds like tons of fun, this isn't the game for you because of the next sections.

[UI]
The UI looks nice, but fails at its job of providing the necessary info to the player. The dev really needs to take a second look at this. Panels that slide open and hide the main view aren't the way to go. The things that are relevant (exhaustion, corruption, status effects, events, etc...) should always be on screen, while irrelevant things (irrelevant stats, old events, etc...) should be hidden away. More zoom levels are also welcome.
The camp UI is a lot better, but still requires too many clicks to do stuff. For example, after researching stuff you are always thrown back to the main camp screen, so you need to go back to the research panel, type of research, set your filter, then click research again (most things need to be researched multiple times).
But again, the UI looks great, its functionality just isn't there yet.

[Dungeon Mechanics]
Dungeons are hard if you think too much about it, but easy if you don't. The knights can auto explore, fight and disarm stuff, and after three fights they lose a well-rested buff indicating that you should call them back to rest. You could try to push your knights further, or concoct elaborate strategies to evade difficult threats, but you're only shooting yourself in the foot that way.

Combat and traps are complicated. From a high-level view, the knight comes in, takes some damage and kills the trap/enemy. On a low level view, I have no idea how it works, and I don't care. The problem isn't necessarily that the combat is complicated, but that the combat is both complicated and player intervention rarely matters. You can play the entire game (as I did) without ever interacting closely with the combat or trap disarming. Add to that the clunky UI, and a sort of ennui sets in.

To make sure that you keep a brisk pace, the floor will send corruption waves (cwaves) your way. These depend on the time spent moving (so not resting, fighting, disarming) your knights do. When a wave hits, the curses on the knights first absorb it (2-3 charges per curse), and then the knights gain temporary corruption. In theory, this sounds terrifying, and I first thought it was a very unfair mechanic. But in reality it doesn't matter.

In short, the strategy is just to make sure your knights rest whenever they lose their rested buff (since at that point they lose stamina every tile, and you can only recover 30 by resting), and make sure they don't stray too far from one another. Even playing extremely passive like this, I would only get three or four cwaves per floor. This in contrast to my first playthrough, where I rushed through floors which allowed me to get it done in two cwaves, but gave me oodles of tcorruption from exhaustion. So the game is really trivial if you know what you are doing, but the default way of playing will punish players heavily. Especially since leaving monsters alive (as you might do in a rush) makes subsequent floors harder.

[Curses]
While the curses are fun from a H-perspective, mechanically the curses are very weak. In fact, as mentioned above, the optimal strategy is to embrace as many curses as you can to give you as many time as you like to clear floors. Some curses don't matter at all, such as rope-bunny (minor lust gain when getting the tied up status effect), or exhibitionist (minor lust gain when in a room that is currently being scryed). Others seem like they should have an effect, but don't really matter, such as scatterbrained (lower stats while disarming traps) or weakness of the mind (temporary corruption when getting the dazed status effect). Then I also had a bunch of hidden curses, which meant they were so situational that they didn't manifest even once during my entire playthrough (I had a lot of those, since I actively wanted as many curses as possible to see what they do).

[H-Content]
There are a few H-scenes, but they are few and far between and some require a lot of work to unlock. The bulk of the content comes from the curses above and the effect on the mental status of the knights. Unfortunately, mental changes aren't shown that clearly (no special scenes). They do affect the in-camp behaviour, but you're unlikely to notice. they also fluctuate very heavily. In a couple "therapy sessions", you can make the proud idealistic knight forget all about those ideals, but nothing will change. Their desires also don't matter. Sure they need desires to learn skills manually, but you will be primarily imprinting from scrolls anyway.

It's really a shame that embracing curses doesn't affect the knights more in camp, and that drives and desires are both easy to manipulate and have little effect. The curses are also hit and miss, getting a knight to embrace exhibitionism is fun, but I don't think anyone has a saboteur fetish.

Also, in theory there are a bunch of text events during combat or traps. Those are just text however, and you can safely ignore them (see the combat mechanics section above). But it's still content I guess.

[Bugs]
As always, games have bugs. There are some minor ones, (TAB-button not working, or incorrect ordering of UI nodes) and some larger ones (sometimes curses gained persist when restarting a floor, you can keep researching during the day to skip dungeon time and stay at camp). I didn't encounter any that are game breaking, though.

[Summary]
Good basis for a game, with very good dialogues and scene setting but mediocre dungeon mechanics. The UI and tutorialization especially needs some work. However, I do look forward to new content, and think it's a solid base for a very good game (if you're into mind control).
Note that the rating is conditional on the fact that it's only an alpha, and is heavily carried by the promising future the game seems to have.

Now this is an excellent game, good story, developing and interesting, and very well written, nice art, music, solid functioning interface. Not a game for a quick fix, some may say, but the game is appropriate here, for the corruption development. Definitely interesting.

A promising early version of a game that's right up my alley.

The tags are great, love to see some MC-content, the gameplay-loop is competent, the art is lovely and the theming is pretty strong.

Really hope this has a bright future.

I've played an early version and while it ran out of content pretty soon and the H content was bare bones then the concept for the game seems very promising.
So i will probably wait a while and come back after a few updates to see how its has been progressing on updates.

Excellent start. Fun dungeon crawling, strong writing/worldbuilding, and interesting, if somewhat cliche, characters. Art/aesthetic are nice. Strongly recommend to any corruption/mind control fans, and looking forward to future updates.

Its pretty fuckin rad tbh. Kinda confusing at first, also confusing later but once you understand what the fuck is going on youre good to go. Gameplay is pretty fun, theres a lot of stuff that can happen to your girls. It is kinda heavy on getting your shit kicked in tho, but thats the idea i think. Id love the main character to get in on the corruption as well but i dont think thats what mr dev intends to so it might be just wishful thinking. All in all it is a very solid 4 star game. And when it gets developed more im sure i wont be wrong to change my rating to five star.

Just play it ya dingbat its good

Going Deeper is a rogue-like dungeon crawler game, with the twist that the player character is an inquisitor sent to investigate the dungeon, without being able to enter it him/herself (you can choose gender). Instead, you met a group of knights who explore the dungeon that you can give commands to, although they have their own personalities and quirks that affect how they act to some extent, which you can later influence to some extent.

As a rogue-like, it is an okay game. Naturally, it doesn't hold a candle to the variety and fun of games like Binding of Isaac. But this isn't that kind of game. This is a porn game. So how does it hold up in that respect right now (aplha 7.1)? Well, it's a start I guess. So the big problem is that...there just isn't much porn in this porn game right now...

To clarify, when the girls go crawling in the dungeon they can encounter mobs and traps. Some of these encounters can lead to the girls getting hornier, start masturbating, become naked, or get astonished by a nude painting (yes, seriously). Some of that is kind of hot, I guess, but it just isn't that much content right now, nor is it that hot...

Recently, more content was added to the camp, where you rest and interact with the girls outside of the dungeon. You can unlock the ability to invite girls to your room and mind control them to influence their desires and drives, as well as weaken or strengthen curses you can make the girls get (with random chance involved). This is a decent start I think. I like when porn games have these aspects of influencing the characters' desires. But it's still too simplistic right now. What I want to see is something more like a body weakness system being implemented in addition, where the girls might for example get more sensitive breasts that makes some mobs and traps more effective, etc...

Another big issue right now is that, besides being able to spy on the girls bathing or having sex with each other, most other porn content is locked behind lose scenes. That sucks. I wish more of these games allowed more hot events without you having to lose.
An idea might be to allow the player character to become more involved in the 'heart' magic of the goddess of the dungeon, maybe becoming able to influence the mobs and traps the girls encounter to subject them to lewd things without them being defeated necessarily. That would be a good excuse to add more lewd, non-defeat events.

In any case, good start to a porn game, but depending on how it progresses it could end up mediocre or great. Time will tell.

for what it is right now it's a very good game, thought out story. good writing. fun mechanics. not a lot of lewd stuff yet but still enjoyable. looking forward to the final product. game is difficult so you need to pay attention to what you're doing. you won't see a lot of content if you intentionally play poorly.

The developer clearly knows what he's doing and game design seems very thoughtful. There are a few UX issues that waste way more time than they should but I trust they'll be ironed out in time.

Just don't bother if you're looking for H scenes. They are very few and far between.

LEAVING THIS REVIEW FOR VERSION [ALPHA 6.5].

Okay, this is an extremely solid foundation for a great 18+ roguelike that I've lost a couple of afternoons playing already and it's not even close to being out yet, so I figure I should probably talk about it a bit.

PROS
+Very nice artwork; even though the developer has said themselves they aren't an artist the portraits, the backgrounds, the icons and everything else are all great as far as I'm concerned.

+Solid gameplay; unlike a lot of roguelikes where emphasis is placed on a player's input skills (i.e. Dead Cells) this is more along the lines of Darkest Dungeon, though the comparison isn't very sturdy. You are 'the guy in the chair' for this game; your job is collecting information, managing resources and occasionally deploying some long-range assistance. There will be plenty of times when you simply have to take a risk, and times when it won't pay off for you. I find it a very interesting way of making the player's ability to strategise important to victory, while also preventing the game from turning into a complete cakewalk.

+Replayability; the game has already implemented a New Game+ system where you can carry over certain benefits from previous runs by purchasing them prior to starting a new run. The currency with which you do so isn't consumed when you use it, so it's less like 'currency' and more like 'capacity'. With every new run you'll be able to start the next one that much stronger.

CONS (bear in mind this is a review of an alpha build; a lot of the stuff here is probably gonna change)
-Limited Content; at the moment just about everything to be done in the game happens in the dungeon, and the camp is just the place you spend a couple minutes re-arranging spells and doing research before heading back in. The developer has already stated they'll be fleshing out the camp greatly in time, so this is less an issue with the game overall and more with just this build.

-Lose to Win; I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of this particular style of implementing 18+ elements in a game. Not in RPGM games, and not here either. Pretty much every 18+ scene I can think of in the game requires you to position a knight in such a way that they're at pretty severe risk one way or another, and if you want to try and collect every scene you're gonna end up doing some serious damage to them over time. Effectively, you can either play the game to reach the end of the dungeon—in which case you can get there with well under 20 corruption if you play carefully and methodically—or you can play it to unlock scenes, in which case you'll more than likely lose the run before getting that far. Now, the scenes are good, and once you've witnessed them you'll be able to replay them on the Research screen after completely researching the trap or monster that caused them, but I'm not sure they're worth the sting of defeat, especially in a game that does demand a certain time investment. Perhaps I'm just not quite compatible with roguelikes in general, but either way I count it as a flaw. That said, the developer has mentioned that other H-content will become available with time, including content outside the dungeon, so this issue may well be resolved.

-Considerable Grind; some people might call this a bonus, and honestly I don't mind it personally, but I feel like it should be talked about. If you want to unlock every scene in the game for your gallery, it's going to take you a while. With a number of monsters and traps totalling somewhere around fifty at the moment (I think, count may be inaccurate but I don't think it's any less than thirty) and an average of somewhere around four or five scenes for each (though some have only two, and one has something like twelve) it's gonna take time – especially when many of those scenes have rather specific requirements for them to trigger, and those requirements can be difficult to finagle, not to mention risky. You could view it as just another aspect of the game's difficulty, but I think that's just a matter of interpretation.

CONCLUSION
Going Deeper, in its current state, is a pleasantly challenging and occasionally titillating way to spend a few hours. Frankly, it's very impressive for an alpha build, and the developer's dedication to bugfixing and their active engagement with the community is both promising and worthy of respect. I'd encourage anyone who's looking for a tactical roguelike with interesting story, surprisingly complex gameplay and the occasional lewd surprise (more if you're actively searching them out) to give it a shot and stick around for its development. This one feels like it'll only get better.